![]() None of those costs will be in the slightest fashion ameliorated by putting a new transmission in the car. It’s got close to 200k miles on it, which means that it will need all sorts of maintenance and repair items in the future. So let’s look at this issue of the Matrix with the busted transmission. Very few people are willing to just turn around and walk away from their existing decisions. ![]() ![]() Those bad decisions can range from having a Cavalier tattooed on your leg to not kicking a woman out of your house when it’s plain that the whole enterprise has long since fallen apart. It stands to reason that if this human characteristic is strong enough to force people to literally walk to their deaths, it has the potential to also cause other bad decisions. If you want the same lesson with a little more guitar technique, Lucky Peterson has you covered. No matter how far wrong you’ve gone / You can always turn around. Gil Scott-Heron has some advice about this: That desire is strong enough to kill people, and it does so all the time. They will continue on in the wrong direction, hoping that this direction will also end up taking them out of danger, and that their incorrect decision will end up being validated after all. If you are a strictly rational human being, you will retrace your steps to the wrong turn and then make the right turn. Six hours later, you realize that your decision was wrong. It sounds ridiculous, right? You are hiking in the woods. Again and again in the book you’ll meet people who died because they did not turn around when they realized they’d made a wrong turn. The most important lesson I took away from Deep Survival is this: Don’t ever let the momentum of one decision carry on into the next. It’s one of the few books that I recommend to pretty much everybody I know, although if you’re already of a cautious or retiring nature it won’t help you to read multiple stories about people who died in the woods just an hour’s walk away from a major freeway. The idea behind “Deep Survival” is to understand the choices that make some people natural “survivors” and others natural victims of circumstance. Which brings me, naturally, to one of my favorite books ever: “ Deep Survival” by Laurence Gonzales. So does it make sense to simply abandon the current car and move up to the XRS, which in addition to the better transmission also has a bit more poke from the engine room? A decent used Matrix XRS with the transmission already installed can be had for between five and six grand. The second is that even at the $1,000-1,500 that you’d pay for what you hope is a sound example of the “C60” transmission, the total cost to swap and do a new clutch at the same time can come pretty close to $3,000. The first is that the six-speed box was never that common, even north of the border. There are problems with that course of action. The same transmission, fortified with a sixth speed and a heavier-duty bearing, is bulletproof, so a lot of devoted Matrix five-speed owners search out a six-speed box and swap it out. It’s apparently a case of too much load on a bearing. In fact, pretty much all of the Corolla/Matrix five-speeds from that era eventually fail. Unfortunately for Chris, however, that manual transmission has a problem. He particularly likes shifting for himself, which is something he hadn’t done in a long time prior to buying the Tracer. His general experience with the car has been positive he likes the little wagon’s proportions, utility, and light weight. After driving a last-generation Mercury Tracer into the ground, he switched to a five-speed Toyota Matrix a few years back. He’s not afraid to spend real money on top-end musical instruments or home-stereo equipment, but when it comes to cars he prefers economy to excitement. My friend Chris lives in the Toronto area where he works in a variety of creative fields and plays the occasional gig on guitar or bass. But to properly answer the question, we’ll need to consider everything from solo ocean journeys to bad seeds in a magic bus. Today’s question seems like a simple one: do you stay in the Matrix or not? In this case, the Matrix is a Toyota Matrix, with the all-too-common manual-transmission failure. Welcome back for another installment of “Ask Jack”, the place for you, the man on the street, to ask me, the man on the Internet, any question you like on any topic that makes its way into your mind.
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